Blog Archives

A walled garden in the context of the internet relays to full control of the user experience. In other words, it is a methodology that is deployed to ensure closed or exclusive content for consumption by a set of users.

One of the prime examples of the walled garden in the technology world is the Apple ecosystem. This constitutes the interplay or hardware and software intricately tied in a manner that precludes any legal way to contaminate the harmony of user experience. Well, at least that is what Apple has vociferously claimed over the ages. They have argued that adopting the walled garden has served to be a bedrock of innovation, and the millions of applications on the Appstore bears out that fact. But the open source folks argue otherwise.

AS PART of an effort to streamline Economist.com and arrange things more logically, we’re closing down the Babbage blog. We’ll continue to post extra science and technology stories online, in addition to those that appear in the print edition, but these will now appear on the Science and technology page, rather than as posts on the Babbage blog. Our aim is t […]

IN THE end, Microsoft fooled everyone. The replacement for its widely disparaged Windows 8 operating system turned out to be not Windows 9, as expected, but Windows 10. No explanation, other than marketing waffle, was given as to why the company should skip a release number. “We know that based on the product coming, and just how different our approach overa […]

IF YOU want something done, the saying goes, give it to a busy person. It is an odd way to guarantee hitting deadlines. But a paper recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests it may, in fact, be true—as long as the busy person conceptualises the deadline in the right way. Yanping Tu of the University of Chicago and Dilip Soman of the Uni […]

EVER since the “paperless office” was first mooted in a Business Week article back in 1975, its estimated time of arrival has always been ten years away. And so it remains. The amount of paper used in homes and offices has declined slightly over the past decade. And certainly an increasing number of organisations have managed to go paperless to some extent, […]

WHEN the autonomous cars in Isaac Asimov's 1953 short story “Sally” encourage a robotic bus to dole out some rough justice to an unscrupulous businessman, the reader is to believe that the bus has contravened Asimov's first law of robotics, which states that “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to […]